A Week in the Rockies
By: Erik Rittenberry
"I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news "
~ John Muir
Hello everyone.
Over the summer I spent a whole week hiking through the Rocky Mountain National Park. To say it was beautiful would be an understatement. It was my third time there, my go-to when the soul needs a cleansing. It’s truly one of my favorite places to get lost in for days — all 415 square miles of it.
The jagged mountains, the scent of pine, the serene rivers and ponds, the wildflower meadows, what a sublime place to be and to explore.
It was Carl Jung who reminded us: “Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.”
Below I wanted to share with you some of the photographs I took, along with some of my favorite passages on nature and adventure. I hope you enjoy it.
I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
—Martin Buber
I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
—John Burroughs
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
~ Hubert Reeves
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.
― Leo Tolstoy
The dream of my life Is to lie down by a slow river And stare at the light in the trees To learn something by being nothing A little while but the rich Lens of attention. - Mary Oliver
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.
~ Robert Bly
When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.
~ Krishnamurti
Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror but my God you’re alive and it’s spectacular.
~ Joseph Campbell
Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.
― Hermann Hesse
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.
— Jon Krakauer
If you want a teacher, try a waterfall. Or a mushroom or a mountain wilderness or a storm-pounded seashore. That is where the action is.
~ Terence Mckenna
Thank you so much for reading. You can find me around the internet at the following:
Medium: https://medium.com/@erikrittenberry
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erik.rittenberry
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erik_rittenberry/
Nice mix of quotations. Glad to see the inclusion of Bly. His "object" prose poems look at the natural world as very few verse poems are capable of. In an interview I did with him, he said the following concerning his object prose poems:
PJ: Specifically, you say that “in the object poem in prose, the conscious mind gives up, at least to a degree, the adversary position it usually adopts toward the unconscious, and a certain harmony between the two takes place.” By “adversary position,” do you mean a poet’s conscious attempt to manhandle or control the object?
RB: Yes. The mind is always tempted to take up a superior position in relation to beings—such as caterpillars or clams—who are without reason. Many philosophers and saints in the West have made efforts to dissolve the adversarial position human beings take toward animals—St. Francis would be one. It’s been slow work. We could say that in a prose poem one can practice writing about an animal or “thing” in a way that wouldn’t be hierarchical, in which one wouldn’t place human beings on top and animals on the bottom. like the way Frost implies in “Two Look at Two” a mysterious sympathy between a human couple and a deer couple. We can feel the lack of hierarchy in Thoreau’s prose as well. So what one ultimately hopes for is a lessening of the empire mentality of the human being, shall we say, a disappearance completely of the thought of inferior races and superior races, a giving up completely of the idea that nature has no consciousness. When some adversarial thinking is cleared away, it’s possible for language to become transparent. For example, when you read one of Ponge’s prose poems, the text, in some way, almost becomes transparent, and one feels one can touch the object itself.
Thank you for heeding Edward Abbey's advice: "Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast…a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”